Read This If You’ll Be Leaving Soon To Work Abroad

In just a few days, you’ll be leaving your beautiful country to pursue a job overseas. You’ve always wanted to work abroad, but to chase your dream, you’d have to make huge sacrifices. Relocating is the price you’d have to pay for dreaming big and wanting a better life.

Deciding to leave the place you call your home and saying goodbye to the people close to your heart isn’t actually something you thought you’d be doing so soon, but here you are now, a few sleeps away from waking up in a different land. As the day of your departure approaches, you’ll find it harder and harder to actually push through with your decision.

Why would you want to subject yourself to the torture of homesickness and adjusting to a different culture and living thousands of miles away from your family? But no matter how much you’ll think things through, your answer will always be the same: you have to do this. You want to do this. Even if it means you’d have to endure possibly the most difficult time of your life.

With the arrival of your work visa and the confirmation of your flight date, you’ll start to experience panic attacks and sleepless nights because your decision will suddenly seem so real — and so painful and exciting and scary at the same time. What was once just a dream is slowly shaping up to be a reality, and you’ll begin to feel its early repercussions as you spend your remaining days in your homeland.

There will be many times when you’ll stop whatever you’re doing and just stare off into space; times when you’ll just sit in a corner and quietly watch your loved ones and realize how much you want to stay. You’ll fight back tears during the day and break down crying at night.

You’ll start to feel like you’re standing on the shore, waiting for the paralyzing and painful impact of a coming tsunami. Moving away to work overseas feels a lot like that. You’re very much aware, as you tick off the days, that you’ll soon be hit with barreling waves of emotions, and you’re dreading the blow, but you know that there’s really nothing you can do about it. After all, this is what you want. This is your decision.

Less than a week before your departure, you’ll start to say goodbye personally to the people who matter most to you. The parties meant to bid farewell and wish you the best won’t feel like goodbyes at all; they’ll feel just like one of your regular nights out with your friends. Normal, usual, routine — save for the goodbye hugs and well wishes at the end.

Remember these nights. You’ll have to keep these memories and the people in it tucked away in a special place in your heart, so you can look back on them and relive them in a blaze of color when friends are rare and hugs are scarce in your new city.

A few days before you leave, you’ll begin to cherish every minute you spend at home and enjoy even the most normal things you do with your family together — like breakfast or movie marathons or dinner time talks. You’ll act normal, even as your heart breaks a little with each family moment shared, even as you memorize every detail in your mind. Remember it all; remember them. They will be your ultimate source of strength and sanity when loneliness hits you hard.

Your heart will bleed as you say goodbye. You’ll cry until you can’t breathe. You’ll feel like you’re running out of time, like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll be sad and happy and scared and excited and hesitant, and it’s all going to be so, so confusing.

If you know that the challenge will break you instead of making you stronger, then don’t leave. Stay and do great things right where you are.

But if you know in your heart that you have the courage and strength to take all of this, to leave everyone you love behind, to live alone in a foreign land, and to endure the sickening loneliness ahead, then, by all means, chase your dream.